Nick Saban addresses NCAA closing 12-man penalty loophole after Oregon-Ohio State game

The NCAA moved quickly this week to close the loophole that Oregon exploited late against Ohio State, putting 12 men on the field, apparently intentionally, to trade five yards for around as many seconds in the dying moments of the game. And the work by the Ducks got a tip of the cap from Nick Saban.

Speaking on “The Pat McAfee Show” on Friday, Saban commended Oregon and head coach Dan Lanning for using whatever room the rules allowed to try and win the game. But he also said the rule should probably be a dead ball penalty and not have time come off the clock, which is essentially what the adjustment to the rule allows.

“I think that this happened at some point, you guys know more about this than I do, a few years ago in the NFL where they had a similar situation where — and they just changed the rule to 12 guys on the field was a dead ball foul,” Saban said. “So, no time went off the clock. Which, I feel like that’s the way it should be. I don’t think that you run a play with 12 guys on the field, which minimizes your chances on offense of having success even though you still could have success and then you lose time in a game and the time is more important than the plays. So, can’t fault the coach for trying to take advantage of the rules.”

Saban then explained how he deployed his staff, at least one member, to know the rules front-to-back so they’d always be prepare to make the right decision, no matter what situation arose.

“And I always had somebody on the staff who was in charge of rules,” Saban said. “And they would always give us a report on, ‘If this situation occurred, what should we do in that situation to take advantage of the rules?’ Or ‘What would be a disadvantage for us?’ That’s kind of how I tried to manage it.”

But being prepared to work smartly within the rules as Saban outlined is, to him, a bit different than Lanning and Co. taking credit for essentially intentionally committing a penalty, knowing it made them more likely to win.

“I didn’t spend a lot of time because I was a guy that was always about execution, man,” Saban said. “And what our team did was the most important thing, so I wasn’t trying to create some advantage by taking advantage of the other team or the rules. Because I always told our players, it’s going to be about what we do. So I didn’t want everybody to think we’re trying to do something outside of our team that was going to help us win. It was going to be about what we did.”